This invention relates to food containers, and particularly to a novel lid for dry food storage containers.
In the past, kitchen type storage containers for consumer markets have been extremely inefficient in dispensing and measuring quantities of dried foodstuffs, including powders. It is not an exaggeration to claim that every kitchen and at least half of the offices in the world store common dry foods like coffee, sugar, powdered milk substitutes, and the like, in jars and containers with removable lids. Opening and closing a kitchen storage container is usually not an efficient nor a pleasant way to access its contents. Scooping or spooning most dry foodstuffs from kitchen canisters is inefficient and cumbersome at best, and often results in spilling the granular or powdered food in the process of extracting it.
Opening most bags, jars and other containers for such food stuffs requires two hands, one hand to hold the bag or jar while the other hand unfolds the top of a bag or unscrews or unlatches the lid of a jar. Although many commercial packages include a scoop in the container, this creates a dilemma. When a jar or canister is full, there are a limited number of places to store the scoop, and this presents a very annoying problem. The scoop is usually tossed into a drawer full of other kitchen utensils where it is difficult to find.
Scoops, when not stashed in the jar of dry stuffs, are usually stored in drawers full of other small kitchen tools. This renders a scoop hard to find at the time when it is most urgently needed, such as to fill a coffee filter, scoop sugar or flour into a waiting recipe, or (what is even more urgent) to prepare a baby's bottle with powdered formula when one can't find the essential measuring scoop and the infant is crying. It is very frustrating to have to search for misplaced or lost measuring scoops. When scoops are jammed into the contents of a canister, the user is confronted with messy handles and the daunting challenge of avoiding the scattering of dry material when the scoop is removed. As if these awkward inconveniences are not annoying enough, many canisters, bags, and cans also have top openings that are too small to allow a normal-sized hand to reach their contents even with a scoop. When a container is half empty, even a small hand may not be able to reach far enough into the jar or container to comfortably scoop out dry material.
Many commercial dispensers use the principle of inverting a container and allowing gravity to feed material to a lower port, door, or slot, thereby limiting access to the ingredients and dispensing controlled amounts of material. Some commercial uses of gravity flow principle are: inverted containers that supply grain and water for animals, hardware store dispensers for nails, and gum, cigarette and candy dispensing machines. There are also less familiar uses for gravity flow and measurement such as the shell loaders used by Civil War soldiers to fill empty bullet shells with gunpowder. By using invertible containers that were attached to his belt, a soldier could crudely measure out enough gunpowder to fill a given shell size.
Most gravity flow dispensers are exclusively for commercial use. The limited number of consumer products that have used gravity flow for dispensing a container's contents have been crude, clumsy, poorly styled, and very inefficient in measuring controlled quantities of material. Consumer type products for the home which use gravity flow to dispense have been limited to nineteenth-century type kitchen cabinets with built-in flour, sugar, and rice storage, for instance, whereby dry foodstuffs were loaded from the top and funnelled to the bottom for removal, through trap doors of comparatively large sizes. Any take out type scoops for these early dispensing containers were ill-fitting, messy, inefficient, and did not permit accurate measuring. Early kitchen dispensers were little more than clumsy hoppers that emptied out as one withdrew a sliding board. The user had to guess in advance when to shut the supply off before it overflowed onto the counter or floor. Prior to my invention, a jar's lid typically had to be opened to measure and access its contents, and the contents had to be extracted with a loose spoon or scoop.